Sam

I am a Cambridge graduate in Natural Sciences from King's College, specialising in Astrophysics. I began tutoring full-time in 2012 and quickly built up a client base, delivering 32 hours of tuition per week in mathematics and the physical sciences as my primary source of income.

I can teach any part of the A-Level maths, further maths or physics courses with no prep time required. This includes the specialist further maths modules (further pure, mechanics, statistics and decision) as well as AQA’s customisable option topics for physics. Chemistry tuition can also be arranged if required.

GCSE tuition is also available for maths, physics and chemistry. This tends to be for Year 11 students with upcoming exams, but plenty have been younger, particularly in homeschooling situations - it all depends on the individual student.

Undergraduates seeking tuition in mathematics should discuss the subject(s) required with me via the website's message system instead of "quick buying" my details - my training is primarily as a physicist, and the degree-level material I teach tends to be more applied than pure. Examples of topics include:

Ordinary differential equations (most Honours-level methods of solution, from integrating factors, exact differentials etc. up to series solutions, Laplace transforms, Green's functions etc.)
Partial differential equations
Fourier analysis (series, transforms, Parseval's theorem)
Calculus of scalar, vector and tensor fields
Complex analysis (eg. contour integration)
Variational calculus
Constrained/unconstrained stationary values

Finally, a lot of my recent work has involved preparing candidates for University entrance exams eg. Cambridge’s NSAA, Oxford’s PAT, and the STEP papers required by some maths courses.

Tutoring Experience

My first client was a medical student who had been looking for help with a maths module at around A Level standard, and I taught him while finishing my final year of school. Throughout my degree I was supervised for 3-4 hours per week by many highly gifted tutors at Cambridge, and their various approaches have greatly influenced my current work. I have been successfully tutoring students one-on-one as my profession for over a decade, including home education of students not at school, and have also spent 18 months leading small classes at an independent tuition academy. My wider freelance education work has seen me teaching larger groups of all ages in environments such as schools, workshops, prisons and Immigration Removal Centres.

Tutoring Approach

REMOTE TUITION UPDATE Since the pandemic, many of my sessions have been taking place via Skype, using a shared screen and Apple Pencil so the students can see what I'm writing - it’s been working very well so far. There are actually advantages over the traditional approach, eg. fast copy-and-paste features, excellent drawing tools, notes emailed as a full-colour PDF document instead of a physical piece of paper etc. This has allowed me to teach people uneasy about face-to-face lessons, but also people living several hours’ drive away who wouldn’t have had the chance prior to 2020.

My approach is based on Cambridge's acclaimed and effective "supervision model", which I experienced throughout my degree across several scientific subjects. What needs to be taught and how will depend on the individual student and their specific level/requirements. I will often recap some relevant theory to iron out any misconceptions before guiding the student through a worked example of a particular type of problem and providing a written solution to a sample question for revision purposes. The next step is usually to help them as they try the method themselves with similar questions, until they are confident enough to do it without any input from me.

Extra-curricular work can be assigned if required/desired, and this would usually consist of just a few carefully-selected exam problems, emphasising content over volume so as not to add unduly to the student's existing course workload. Written notes are provided following each session. These can be physical or digital for in-person sessions, but will have to be digital (full-colour PDF documents) for online sessions.

Most students opt for either 60, 90 or 120 minute time slots each week, depending on the material to be covered and the time available.

I can provide extremely valuable help to both students seeking remedial instruction and those looking to consolidate their knowledge and ensure high grades - however, students must be reasonably self-motivated to get the most out of the sessions.